Jagged-toothed mystery monster; needs identifying

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Follow on Twitter @TetZoo.

Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Follow on Twitter @TetZoo.

It’s Friday and I’m about to go away on fieldwork for a while, so let’s have some fun (even though substantial media interest in the new Isle of Wight azhdarchoid pterosaur Vectidraco continues unabated). Why not knock yourself out and have a go at identifying this bizarre skeletal tetrapod, surely one of the weirdest things you’ve ever seen (yes yes, hyperbole). Hey, if you’re a regular reader and have never bothered to go through all that hassle of registering with Scientific American in order to finally leave comments… maybe now’s the time to change your ways and finally join the elite. Yes? Of course.

In actuality, the thing shown here is – as (nearly) always – actually dead easy to identify, and to those of you who can get it straight away, may I please ask you to show a little restraint and let the less gifted/nerdy have a few bashes first. Go on, let them; it can be funny. If you really can’t help yourself, at least have fun by peppering the comments thread with clues.

About the Author: Darren Naish is a science writer, technical editor and palaeozoologist (affiliated with the University of Southampton, UK). He mostly works on Cretaceous dinosaurs and pterosaurs but has an avid interest in all things tetrapod. His publications can be downloaded at darrennaish.wordpress.com. He has been blogging at Tetrapod Zoology since 2006. Check out the Tet Zoo podcast at tetzoo.com! Follow on Twitter @TetZoo.

56 Comments

I know what this beastie is, most certainly. I’ll keep from revealing it. But an enormous clue, the lower incisors, just fucking look at them. If the lower incisors don’t give it away, you are a hopeless case, really…

Well, if you only had the lower front teeth, and not a very good picture, then it could be confusing because that anatomical adaptation is convergent from multiple different tissues in distantly related animals. I think you should demand that the name of this feature be supplied with the name of the species.

I like the way it’s going so far. Well done everyone, lots of col-lues (ha ha!) but no actual releasing of the answer. Let’s please let it carry on for a few more hours, at least. And where are the token spoof answers?

There are actually two species of this sort of animal and I don’t dare say which one this is, being not particularly well-versed in them.

They may not have turned up in Paleogene European deposits, but there were, if I remember correctly, mammals in that place and age that shared at least of some of their peculiar locomotion with this type of animal. Some North American fossils have also been considered related to them. One such fossil has a name suggestive of a type of celestial bodies as well indicating a fossil mammal.

The teeth are reminiscent of a crabeater seal. Let’s see…not a possum….skull’s too long to be procyonid and the shape’s not caniform or viverrid….Someone mentioned pectinate incisors, but colugos and lemurs have fair-sized canines…..

Obviously an otter from a coastal population. Lower incisors adapted for scraping barnacles and other sedentary organisms off rocks, other teeth sharp-pointed for catching fish, eyes enlarged for diving in dimly-lit kelp forests

@Jerzy: gotta admit though, if I had a cloak that allowed me to glide and camouflage like a colugo, I’d at least think about getting into the superhero business. Probably by taking an phone with me and phoning in crimes in progress, but still.

I’ve been reading TZ since version 1, but it took an “unknown” skull to get me to finally register here. But it was worth it because this animal is one of my favorites. I’ve always loved the [blanking] [thingy]. Sure, it isn’t really a [thingy], and sure, it doesn’t actually [blank], but that isn’t its fault. It is beautiful in its own way.

Those are truly, deeply, weird premolars! Going by them alone, I’d say it was probably something in the Triconodontid area.
…But the skull looks too fresh for that. (Grin!)

So… those comblike incisors remind me of something. Is it a dermopteran?

(((And, just for the record: I find Scientific American’s log-in requirement annoying, and its login PROCEDURE… VERY annoying. Username changed to AlHazen in honor of Ibn al-Haytham, and, mainly, because I had to change it to SOMETHING other than my former (and real) name, Allen Hazen.)))

It’s a Bittern (Botaurus unlikelii).
The novice could be thrown by the absence of the rhamphotheca, but the eye of the experienced tetzooer is immediately drawn to the tell-tale comb-like structures (used for preening) at the anterior extremity of the lower mandible. Also of note are the large cranial concavities used to direct its boom at unsuspecting ornithologists.

Yes, we ALL HATE THE SCIAM REGISTRATION AND LOGIN SYSTEM and have done everything we can to change it (by which I mean: get rid of it). Bora and the other SciAm staff are on our side; alas, the people at the top of the pile JUST DO NOT GET IT (they clearly aren’t the sort of people who read or use blogs) and it’s they who have prevented change.

Anyway.. it should be obvious throughout this entertaining comment thread that the skull is something to do with dermopterans, or colugos. But the real challenge: who can get it to species?

I’d guess (and already vaguely did back in comment 3) that it’s Galeopterus. It appears that Cynocephalus has larger upper canines and second incisors than those of the other colugo, and it seems the cusps are either much less developed or absent.

I am somewhat surprised at the ideas given here that the skull is from a colugo. Its synapsid features show that it is from the Synapsida but its dentition features and tremendous cranial ridges show that it is of the Permian gorgonopsian group. It is a shame that there is no scale in the picture becuase this is making the skull look small, it must really be large and this would show its gorgon identity best. I have done a big study of these animals and know this.

Of course pectinate incisors may be mostly about grooming, but those cheek teeth are really strange. The molars seem to be almost zalambdodont, and I don’t know if there’s a word to describe the premolars. These things are supposed to be folivores, so WTF?
Maybe they have a little secret. What is the aerial equivalent of krill in a tropical forest habitat?
What kind of thingy? Starts with a G.

Bah, late to the party. I agree with #1 that the incisors did turn out to be a big clue but, if like me (a layperson), you haven’t seen such things, you then have to rely on search skills to narrow it down. (“Pectinate teeth” gave me fish and snails but “pectinate incisors” hit the bull’s eye).

The lack of prominent canines, the relative size and incompleteness of the orbit, and the size of the blade at the back of the mandible lead me to prefer G. over C. as the genus (altho’ I suppose it could be a female or sub-adult C. – I have no idea what the variation is).

Molecular data have revealed deep divergences between different lineages within one of these ‘species’, which suggests that it should be split into at least three separate ones. The reference (surely we don’t need to pretend anymore that we don’t know what this is?) is:

Dartian: Reminds me a lot of the greater slow loris, which now encompasses 7 species.

Makes me wonder if there are other small-medium mammals in Southeast Asia with widespread distributions that are actually a lot more diverse than we traditionally think. After all, pig-tailed macaque and clouded leopard were once considered a single species each, but have since been split into Indochinese and Sundaic species.

@Hai-Ren
Actually, macaques and slow loris were split as “species” with differences on a level of traditional subspecies of modern mammals. Some biologists simply changed definition of the species.

This is a minor pewee of me – so many “real”, deeply distinct and genetically unique mammal species are overlooked and unstudied, why drown them among such pseudo-species?

But certainly there can be “real” species, deeply divergent by traditional definition in S Asian mammals.

In S American mammals, there is species-level genetic distinction among collared peccaries and oncillas from C America and S S America. Paradoxically, nobody is especially interested in splitting those “solid” splits.

Jerzy: to claim a science-based split, you have to do a lot of work: big sample size, including some samples from the contact/overlap zone, nuclear DNA, searching old literature for available names, all that old-fashioned crap called “science”. To do a bogus split, all you need is a few skins, or even sound recordings, and a quick analysis of mtDNA. And you get to put your name on the new “taxon”. As soon as you publish it, it gets picked up by the media, excited birdwatchers, happy nature reserve managers who now have another endemic… even if fifty years later someone would go through the pains of exposing your fraud, what do you care?

John: as far as we know now, there’s only non-sacred niloticus in Botswana. Of course, you’d have to do a lot of tests do prove a negative, but I haven’t heard of any suchus south of DRC yet.

David: I resent your irony. In DRC, anyone can gather a private army and seize a province or two. In PRC, you don’t even have the basic human right to wear shorts – they are considered totally inappropriate thanks to heavy missionary infestation.

Darren has succeeded in getting me to register on this new site just to ask what this is! I’ve been googling various Colugo skulls (after trying many other groups of animals first of course) and from the google image results, I’m not comfortable with Galeopterus variegatus yet. It’s an incredibly interesting looking skull to me (very much the layperson) – it’s driving me mad not knowing what it is! :O

It’s weird, all right. Aside from the tooth combs, why would an animal that supposedly eats mostly fruit have the molars and premolars (and apparently, weird, multicusped canines and upper incisors) of an insectivore? And are those tooth combs really for grooming? And what’s with the mostly toothless premaxilla? Mammals are strange.

The premolars – are there really canines? – don’t quite look like an insectivore’s. The cusps look extremely tall, rounded, and there don’t seem to be any cutting edges. Some triconodonts have somewhat similar teeth, but what they really look like are conodonts! Mwahah.

According to Wikipedia: “The dental formula of colugos is: Upper: 2.1.2.3, lower: 3.1.2.3.” So yeah, not only are there canines, they’re the third tooth, and the two in front of that are upper incisors. And the upper incisors have been displaced way toward the back.

I highly recommend Colugo: The Flying Lemur of South-east Asia by Norman Lim, perhaps the best publication dedicated to the biology and ecology of colugos. It’s a little dated now (published in 2007, refers to literature up to 2005), but it’s a comprehensive overview of much of what is known about colugos.

Sooo…I’m going to be the slow one who has to ask… was it Galeopterus variegatus? When you search for “Galeopterus variegatus skull” on google images, these pics show up now, so confirmation of the species on this page may help future searchers .